I have received an advance copy of The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, which is due out next month, and I've found much that's fascinating among its 2,000 plus alphabetically arranged entries. However, I fear that some writers' noses may be severely out of joint when they peruse it. Certainly, some of the omissions that I've already come across are startling, as are some of the errors.
Editor Robert Welch, Professor of English at the University of Ulster, declares in his preface that, when deciding upon contemporary writers, he "aimed to include writers of literary merit and achievement," and accordingly there are individual entries for such novelists as Maeve Binchy, Patrick McCabe, Eoin McNamee, Glenn Patterson and Colm Toibin. But among the novelists you won't find included are Bruce Arnold, Mary Beckett, Ita Daly, Hugo Hamilton, Mary Leland, Colum McCann, Joseph O'Connor or Frank Ronan.
The standing army of 10,000 contemporary poets fares better (not all 10,000, mind you), while of dramatists I mainly noted the absence of Heno Magee, a striking urban voice in the Abbey of the 1970s, and Wesley Burrowes, whose work for RTE has been significant and influential.
Academics, though, get a very raw deal. Denis Donoghue is excluded, as are Augustine Martin and Declan Kiberd, and though Roy Foster gets an entry, Terence Brown and J.J. Lee don't, despite having written important social and cultural histories of modern Ireland. Among literary outlets, you'll find entries for The Bell, Irish Writing and The Honest Ulsterman, though not The Kilkenny Magazine, The Lace Curtain or the Irish Press's "New Irish Writing", and though the Dublin Magazine is mentioned, John Ryan isn't.
The inclusion of Van Morrison is truly bizarre. Yes, I think he's wonderful, too, but what's he doing here, especially when he's the only musician I can find in the whole book? Only Robert Welch knows, though I must say I do detect a strong Northern bias throughout, even if Brian Keenan - the author of one of the finest books to have come from an Irish writer in recent years - is mysteriously left out.
As for some of the errors that have already jumped out at me: John McCann wrote I Know Where I'm Going, not I'll Know Where I'm Going; the co founder of Druid is Garry Hynes, not Garry Hines; and John O'Donovan died in 1985, not 1994. And I've no idea what went wrong with the Elizabeth Bowen entry: her 1932 novel is called To the North, not The North; her 1941 story collection is entitled Look at All Those Roses, not Look at All the Roses; her 1951 book is called The Shelbourne, not The Shelbourne Hotel; and there is no such 1942 book as Bowen's Court and Seven Writers - though published in the same year, Bonn's Court is one book and Seven inters is another.
Set against the overall interest and scholarship of this volume (ten years in the making), these quibbles over details may seem niggling and petty, but it's in the details that the real authority, or otherwise, of such an undertaking rests.
IN the current issue of Auberon Waugh's Literary Review, Andrew Lycett, whose biography of Ian Fleming was recently published, begins a piece on novelist L.P. Hartley by declaring "There are no prizes for knowing the most widely quoted opening to a twentieth century novel: `The past is a different country: they do things differently there.'"
Well, no prizes for Mr Lycett, anyway. The first sentence of The Go Between actually reads "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Miss Moneypenny would have known that.
As for it being "the most widely quoted opening," it must surely have some competition from Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier ("This is the saddest story I have ever heard"). Daphne du Maurier's Rebeccao ("Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again ") or indeed from stately, plump Buck Mulligan descending the stairhead with his bowl of lather.
WHO needs agents? Not Mike McCormack, anyway. The 30 year old writer, whose first book - a collection of stories called Getting It in the Head - was launched in Waterstone's on Thursday night, took a chance and sent the manuscript off to a series of publishers. Eighteen rejections later, it was finally accepted by Jonathan Cape, who describe it as "richly imaginative, bitterly funny, powerful and original".
Born in Louisburg, Co Mayo, and armed with a degree in English and Philosophy from UCG, he worked in a butcher's shop in Galway while he was writing most of the stories. He won second prize in the Ian St James awards two years ago, and he thinks he was approached by an agent at a function to celebrate this, but he didn't pay much attention at the time and that's all he knows about the breed to date.
Mary Morrissy's much praised first novel, Mother of Pearl, which has already been on sale for a number of weeks, was also officially launched on Thursday night in the same venue, and both writers read from their work to an encouragingly large gathering.